Trucks is a short story written by Stephen King. The story was originally published in the June 1973 issue of Cavalier, and was later included in King's 1978 collection Night Shift.
Summary[]
David Murray, the story's narrator, and a handful of strangers find themselves trapped together in a freeway truck stop diner after semi-trailers and other large trucks are suddenly brought to independent life by an unknown force and proceed to gruesomely kill every human in sight. The survivors hiding in the diner include the narrator, a counterman, a trucker, a young man named Jerry, his girlfriend, and a salesman named Snodgrass. As the story begins, Snodgrass cracks under the strain, attempts to flee across the stop's parking lot and is knocked into a drainage ditch, taking hours to die. The situation worsens when the diner's power goes out, and the narrator's attempt to collect any available drinking water ends in near-disaster. A note of hope appears when the trucks begin to run out of gas. An enormous semi-truck noses up to the front window and demands, via its horn blasting Morse code, that the humans start pumping fuel. The narrator is out-voted when he suggests they comply and a bulldozer arrives and proceeds to attack the diner. The narrator and a teenager named Jerry destroy the dozer with improvised Molotov cocktails, but the diner is half-destroyed and Jerry is killed, chewed under the dozer. The remaining three humans surrender and, taking turns, start pumping the gas into the mile-long string of waiting trucks. As he toils, the narrator thinks that perhaps this will last only until the trucks rust and fall apart, but he then has a grim vision of forced assembly lines churning out new generations of trucks with workers who simply work until they drop dead from fatigue, and the entire world flattened out and remade in its new masters' image. The story ends as a pair of planes fly overhead, and the narrator laments that they're probably pilotless.
Adaptations[]
The story was adapted by King into the 1986 film Maximum Overdrive, and was later remade in 1997.